IMAGINE taking a phone call where a life-sized virtual person is beamed from your mobile or chatting to a mate as they magically appear from your watch.

It’s the kind of holographic technology that Star Wars and other movies have dangled in front of our face for decades and now it could become reality.

The hologram is often hailed as the poster child for the future of technology but because it needs large and expensive machines with mirrors to manipulate images, it has not yet taken a bow on everyday devices.

However, the Wall Street Journal reports that the dream may be closer than we think. Californian company Ostendo Technologies has developed a miniature projector that can fling floating images from smartphones.

The a company claims that the projectors “are roughly the size of Tic Tacs, powered by a computer chip that can control the colour, brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million pixels”.

Just one chipset is capable of projecting a 48-inch image on a surface. While at the moment it is only a 2D image the report mentions being witness to a working 3D prototype where “a set of six chips laid together beamed a 3D image of green dice spinning in the air”.

Don’t think the hologram will have the hazy, sketchiness we have come to expect in movies either, according to the article Ostendo’s chips deliver 5000 dots-per-inch. To put that in perspective, the iPhone’s pin-sharp Retina display has about 300 dots-per-inch.

The current 2D projector is being slated for integration into handsets in 2015 and a second iteration of the chip with full 3D holographic capabilities could be released in the second half of 2015.

Ostendo’s ultimate vision “is to have chips everywhere electronic displays are needed, whether it is a glasses-free 3D TV, a smartwatch, or tables that can project hologram-like images.

One day shake our heads at the thought we used to watch content that was stuck behind a screen which is pretty scary but exciting stuff.